The second trait doesn’t speed up the game. So not a priority of the designers. 
Risking poking the transparency bear… again:
My concern is that the Sunspear change was intentionally held back… just like the PvP gold change. If you’re that worried about blowback, it should be an indication that the content (or timing) of that change should be seriously reconsidered.
I’m actually more concerned about the
Valraven’s may replace battle bosses in the new World Events.
and the following:
Scoring: New events will have new ways of scoring. They may score off of items dropped by your enemies, specific troops or troop types killed, …
Man how do you think I feel? As mentioned, the permastorm removal really crippled this Hero and associated troops (ie Phoenicia) in ranked PvP. I had Pho upgraded less than a week before this occurred out of the blue. Had I known this was coming I would have taken those two Nysha medals and gold elite two Legendaries instead.
Another mediocre killing the class “Sunspear”.
This is just the next phase of “let’s forcefully extend how much time a player has to spend in the game to keep up”.
These are the same devs who for whatever reason refuse to remove the extra clicks from Explores - AFTER the biggest QOL update before the Explore rework involved doing exactly that.
Anyone who thinks that things are not being done to continue to incrementally slow us down is deluded at this point. Gotta get that engagement up. I’m going to guess that someone at 505 or IP2 considers 4x speed a mistake.
Who pulled 2 legs off the Aranaea Medal?
The Gems of War God Seasons did.
He needs a time-out on the naughty step.
Purple GW day, I used to run this team … I wonder if its any good anymore???
I mean it probably is but only if I get perfect luck. Which means its really not.
NO, my Firestorm got overridden by their Titan’s Duststorm instantly, and I get no fire. Thanks for freaking NOTHING.
I think he’s already on time out. He’s allowed to play in a little under 2 weeks.
I can probably live with having much less variety of options being an end-game player, aside from GW with Fireblade and Storm override&enforce, I barely played with Sunspear lately having other useless and disappointing classes to level up with generic teams that can pull some dead weight. yet, I’m… kinda vilid right now thinking what that change means.
Players who’ve barely started the game, including my alt, loved Sunspear. It was highly versatile as a class with weapons, unlike Umberwolf that only takes space, its storm was “obtainable” (some troops take ages to drop, literally) and stayed around long enough to be actually useful for the slow-paced teams (no gem mastery, no troops, no traits, low stats). An end-game player who can put together a fast and/or looping team doesn’t really care how long is the storm (as long as there are no overrides), growing accounts do. Sunspear’s storm was one of a few they could actually ‘feel’ and benefit from.
Also, there are tons of teams that relied on that last trait, needed it to run somewhat smoothly and were shared in guides, streams and on Discord servers. We’ll find other ways to kill things (and throw away from the ‘actually useful’ pile troops like Dragon Soul, Divinia and some others). But…
there would be a huge confusion to deal with cause new and casual players will be digging up or referencing the old guides, recommendations and teams, investing into something that wouldn’t work anymore. I’m still telling beginners that Divines are not a thing anymore, and glad that by the time they get the resources they’ve figured out a thing or two.
Now even in my alt’s guild there are disappointed players who spent their scarce resources to trait Sunspear and were working on mastering it at the cost of working on some other classes.
This is an important point.
It’s apparently not a thing anymore, but previously, when troops were nerfed “adjusted”, players would be given the ability to refund them - as in, get back the traitstones/souls that were spent on that troop.
This type of fundamental change to a class, when leveling a class is already a ridiculous timesink, should come with a similar refund and allow players to spend their hard-earned resources as well as the Class EXP elsewhere.
RIP Sunspear, RIP Phoenicia, both ones of my favourites. I will never stop wonder how among all that awesome things the devs manage to do that stupid ones. bring the third trait back! 
I agree with you. Right now low explore level 5 could be easily done with Phoenicia team, but level 7 is possible with fully medaled Phoenicia.
But you have to avoid some kingdoms, where troops overwrite firestorm or you used Sunspear.
By getting more and more magic stats in the future, i’m sure Phoenicia could reach level 9 explore one day (i finished wild court event yesterday with it for example), so after this nerf to Sunspear devs only have to add more troops, that overwrites storm, like an upcoming troop in April for Whitehelm (coincidence?).
That’s why i disagree in that point with you: this is a nerf to token gaining in amount and rarity and also for arcane traitstones and it will be a bigger nerf in the future.
So you’ve heard to the wrong players, because - as this thread correctly carverd out - the Trait wasn’t similar to the Talent but completely different in function.
It’s commonly understood that the developers and designers of Gems of War don’t actually play Gems of War. They rely on “feedback” (I don’t know where that actually comes from) instead. The rationale which has been said many times is “When you work on a game every day for hours and hours, you don’t want to come home and play that same game.”
Just wonderful.
The worst part is I’m not even sure if they do or don’t realize how much they have turned this game into work to keep up.
Also, I’m tired of this “silent majority” they reference. What majority demands to pay more for less? What majority demands a bigger gap of power between certain troops and classes?
It’s either outright lies, or worse, people who frankly are casual gamers who don’t know anything. There are many people who need their hand held when gaming as and the slightest difficulty sets them off.
Sunspear, even at its worst on brown Gw day is still far less broken and was a possible counter to life and death. Hell, even without a setup L&D is way better than most weapons by a long shot. Since there were absolutely zero changes to it, I’m led to believe the devs are liars or the players they listen to don’t know a thing about balance.
I absolutely do not believe this. There is ONE thread in this forum only and it contains less than 20 posts, of which only 2 request some kind of sunspear revamp. This hardly constitutes significant feedback which negatively paints one of the games best and most enjoyable classes. Please provide links to the other feedback sources you mention so that myself and the overwhelming majority of players who are justifiably outraged by this nerf can take solace in the knowledge that you are telling the truth. If links aren’t available, screen grabs will suffice. Thank you.